What modern authoritarian leaders have in common (and how they can be stopped). Ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviours of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of resources and corroding or destroying democracy. Their mutual-admiration club also draws on models from the past. Vladimir Putin rehabilitates Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin, Donald Trump praises Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi, Jair Bolsonaro admires Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan invokes Adolf Hitler as the model of an efficient leader. Ruth Ben-Ghiat covers a century of authoritarianism to explain why strongman rulers in Africa, Europe, and Latin America, drawing from a familiar playbook of machismo, propaganda, violence, and corruption, have found widespread support even as they bring ruin to their countries. Strongmen's fruit of decades of research gives readers insight into how such rulers think, who and what they depend on, and how they can be opposed.